London Word Festival: The Quiet Volume

“The Quiet Volume is a whispered, self-generated performance for two at a time, exploiting the particular tension common to any library worldwide; a combination of silence and concentration within which different people’s experiences of reading unfold. Two readers sit side-by-side. Taking cues from words both written and whispered they find themselves burrowing an unlikely path through a pile of books. The piece exposes the strange magic at the heart of the reading experience, allowing aspects of it we think of as deeply internal to lean out into the surrounding space, and to leak from one reader’s sphere into another’s.”